A Personal Gesture 2020 - present
2023 © rinihurkmans
photo: 2021 © Swaen Lievestro
November 28, 2020 - April 1, 2021: the arm is with Anne Vegter.
During the Amsterdam Art Weekend on the 28th of November 2020, Anne Vegter, poet, writer, and president of the Akademie van Kunsten, takes home the artwork A Personal Gesture after she accepted it from Rini Hurkmans. On that occasion, Anne Vegter read the following text:
My connection to this moment is the early involvement of the Akademie van Kunsten in your residency in Rome, at the Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome (KNIR). We chose your Pietà project as surprising, vital and connective research. Connecting when it came to ‘cross-fertilisation’ between art and science, a mission of the Akademie van Kunsten from its inception. During your stay at the KNIR, you wanted to inform scientists about your research, your trip to the world-famous marble quarry in Carrara, your observations of the unique press photo that shows the minute after the attack on Michelangelo's Pietà. Conducting artistic research with the aid of scientific insights, in your case: among others knowledge of restoration science and philosophy. Result: Artisanal new work linked to an own vision of our future.
The press photo of the attack in 1972 became an immediate cause for a life-long new work. Since then, you have delved into the archetypal form of the Pietà, the relationship between a woman and cargo, the stylized suffering of the mother amid a masculine world, with reference to year, time and specific challenges slash context of the moment when you create your contemporary Pietà, with you as the symbol of the woman, aka Maria. But also: the position of the perpetrator. The relationship between destruction and resurrection, life that recovers death. Perpetrator as a victim, just as much. An admirable contribution to social healing in a broader perspective. Once moved by that act of violence, now translated into an offer, a sacrifice, a call: see the human!
An arm goes on a journey.
Very special, fantastic even to get this extra arm, a third arm, but one that reaches out, as you write: offers itself and presents something: the riddle of the reaching hand. And hey, what I thought: for me, it is the first unknown hand I can touch since March two thousand and twenty, a small step to Amsterdam, a giant leap for Rome. Mary's third arm, tender but stern, devout - not like the third arm in Rembrandt's sketch 'The bedstead', in a cosy rutting position - but sensual, open and sense-seeking, meaningful. An arm with a hand that also expresses surrender. I will spare you the string of words associated with the word ‘arm’, okay a few then: artificial arm, upper arm, backward twister, elbow knuckle, humerus muscle, basilic vein, arm stump. Then for the hand: forehand, hindquarters bone, carpal bone, pea bone. Nice words.
You wrote an accompanying essay, ‘A Reconsideration of the Gesture’ that I recommend to everyone. Rini takes you through her research, takes you by the hand, you could say, through the destruction of the Pietà in the St. Peter's Basilica in 1972 to the construction of the next paradigm for art: interrogator of ethical foundations of a society. The literal reaching hand as in a travelling arm, a solid transcription of Michelangelo's demolished wandering arm in search of housing, say contemporary poor relief.
21 May 1972 enforces the correlation
Between geologist and hand pattern.
Stonemason's hammer, sweat canal,
Resurrection, emergency landing:
Chunk maker, Mary’s eye fracture
Rini writes forms of loss
(bone fractures: nose, socket, arm)
Of senses, loss of sense.
What remains is pale marble
Memory.
What holds together questions
The traits of, lineaments:
Reaching hand writes breath
Between skin and skin, finger joint,
Ball of a hand, backward twister.
Feel what introduces itself, present
The left-arm as a print, reference
From an invitation to and how it flirts and points.
What it does not see: the free left that
The Roman judge greets, folds
Back to this gesture, overcome.
©Anne Vegter, 2020
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